The past was not that cute

> And those tribes in good territory, they did not had so much back braking work, as long as big land animals were around

The population of paleolithic humans never reached anywhere close to that of agricultural humans, suggesting that many died before reproductive age. Multiple nomadic cultures independently decided to not only spend several hours a day picking and grinding grass seeds to eat, but also to cultivate them for thousands of years into grains that would still be barely palatable by the standards of today. Nobody would choose this life unless if they had to.

Being stationary and cultivating grains allows a surplus that is much harder to achieve with hunting.

This allows the formation of a priest class that can tell you what the sky father wants you to do.

They may have had to but it need not be because it led to more calories for them.

Hunters have priests and supersticions. A lot of them.

"Nobody would choose this life unless if they had to."

You mean nobody would choose the half nomadic hunters life?

Hm, some indigenous cultures I spoke to disagree, but the choice is not there anymore, as the bison herds they sustained on got slaughtered. The conflict of the nomads vs sedentary is an old one and the establishment of the latter, made the old ways of life simply impossible.

Some hunters have elders rather than dedicated full time priests, and they can veer more rabbinical; they've got the stories and pass down the classics as food for thought and discussion.

On a superstition v superstition basis it's hard to get a photo finish between them and a Bishop.

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Exactly. It reminds me of all of the maundering about being "forced to work" (ie. having to earn some income in order to purchase some of the bounty with which we're surrounded) which usually comes along with the "hunter-gathering was a life of luxury" mindset. Literally nothing is stopping anyone from walking off into the forest and living off berries and grubs, except that (a) they don't have the required knowledge to live off the land, and (b) they're not willing to do so, because (c) it's a miserable existence compared with living in a house with hot and cold running potable water, strong walls and a lockable door, electric amenities, and a comfy bed and sofas. Nobody's forced to work, we choose to because all of the above are nice things that are worth some effort to maintain.

The agricultural people were able to produce, collect and store a surplus, which allowed them to raise armies. After that, it was all downhill for the hunter gatherers. They no so much chose the settled life, but were co-opted to it.

Living in the forest is illegal.

You're completely missing my point. Without any external pressure, multiple peoples concluded that settling and eating grass was preferable to being nomads. Yes, this includes the ancestors of the bison hunting plains tribes. It was only with the population collapse due to smallpox and introduction of horses where the nomadic way of life became dominant again.

Until the invention of firearms, nomads had equal footing with settled people, if not an advantage (e.g. Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan). The main advantage that agricultural civilizations had was population size.

"The main advantage that agricultural civilizations had was population size."

Metallurgy?

Not just firearms.

Stone axe vs bronze sword?

Bronze sword vs iron sword?

Iron sword vs steel?

Nomadic people got their advanced weapons usually through trade from settled ones. The nomadic horse archers dominance was rather an exception, also their kingdom included cities where the weapons they used were made.

"Without any external pressure, multiple peoples concluded that settling and eating grass was preferable to being nomads"

And there always was external pressure. Also .. our knowledge of that time is just fragmentary. We don't even know the real names of those cultures.

So yes, clearly there were benefits to settling and planting corn, otherwise humans would not have done it. But to my knowledge, it is not correct to call it a voluntarily process in general. Once there are fences, the nomadic lifestyle does not work anymore. Adopt or die out was (and is) the choice.

All technological advancement is downstream of population size and in particular density.

You can't divide work if you aren't near enough other people.

The big difference between agrarian and nomadic populations is that the latter is decentralized. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle is generally very leisurely, but it's strictly limited in population viability. A tribe of some tens of people? Sure, no problem. A city of 5,000 people? It just doesn't work, because you'd end up wiping out the resources in your region faster than nature could replenish them.

So you're never going to see a massive hunter-gatherer population, essentially by definition. It doesn't say anything at all about their standards of life, which by most accounts were (and are) exceptionally high. [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society

You can camp indefinitely on BLM forest land as long as you’re willing to move your camp site every two weeks

Religion is not exclusive to agrarian societies. Indeed, much of proto-indo-European religion (ie the OG “sky father” [1]) was developed on the steppes in a pastoral lifestyle.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Dy%C4%93us

Not in the US. There is a lot of BLM land if you want to live a nomadic lifestyle in the middle of nowhere.

For hunting in a way you want? Not having to pay taxes? Raise your children in the nomadic hunter livestyle? I think schooling (and lots of other things) is mandatory in the US as well. And child protection service etc. exist. So it might be easier in the US to cosplay as a forest nomad for some time (and I know some people did it as eremits for a bit longer) but a real nomadic livestyle means living with other people together in a tribe. That does not work (just the rule to move camp after 2 weeks prevents that).

"Without any external pressure, multiple peoples concluded that settling and eating grass was preferable to being nomads."

Portraying it as an individual choice is inaccurate. The process of populations becoming sedentary(and agrarian) spans over multiple generations and wasn't really reversible. The early settlements likely only worked because they had some method to force people from leaving and the later settlements had to be sedentary because their neighbours were sedentary, it had a cascade effect. Oversimplified but that's the gist.

Read into it; it happens, and CPS isn’t usually involved until it’s well into horror-show territory.

It’s usually around a cult or similar; we don’t have much in the way of hereditary nomadic but even those do exist.

Most nomadic cultures did not move this fast. You have to be spending a lot of time moving if you do this.

I think I did read about it and met folks who are into that. I have never been in the US, though, but the main complaint I got is pretty much, state laws make it impossible. But I am open for reading suggestions.

You're not going to grow any food or hunt anything that way, though. It's not the same.

> Literally nothing is stopping anyone

Nothing but the power of the state, which has claimed sovereignty over all the land, regulates what you can and cannot do with it, and will use deadly force against you if you fail to comply.

I once added up the total calorie content of all the yearly hunting it is legal to do where I live, if a hunter were maximally successful, and it would get one person through May.

All the land one could reasonably sustain a living on has long since been claimed, those claims being backed up by (you guessed it) the power of the state. The only land left that one can just walk off into is the land nobody wanted during the settlement period, because they could not find any way to live on it.

A state small game hunting license is very cheap

And very limited.

I mean, what exactly are phrases like "strictly limited in population viability" and "never going to see a massive population" euphemisms for, exactly? High mortality, intense resource competition and survival of the fittest. Not what we normally associate with "exceptionally high standards of life". The higher the standard of life, the more procreation happens, the more demand there is for a constant supply of resources, and then starvation and warfare turns that supposedly noble savage into quite a vicious competitor.

Studies show a chaotic predator/prey relationship over time. When the ratio is small, it's fat times for the predators, and the predator population soars. Then they overhunt, and the prey diminishes, and the predator population crashes.

It's not stable.

The first labor-saving invention was theft.

TV tells me that hunting wabbits is not very productive.

It isn't common but it definitely happens in some parts of the US.

There are no taxes to pay if you aren't earning anything. It is legal, if inadvisable, to raise children this way in much of the US. There is a "live and let live" ethos around it, especially in the western US. The true nomads are probably most common in the mountain West of the US in my experience. While the rule is two weeks in one location, in many remote areas there is no enforcement and no one really cares. They sometimes have mutually beneficial arrangements with ranchers in the area. These groups tend to be relatively small.

Alaska is famously popular for groups of families disappearing into the remote wilderness to create villages far from modern civilization. It is broadly tolerated there. Often many years will pass between sightings of people that disappeared into the wilderness.

I always wondered what a high-resolution satellite survey of the Inside Passage of Alaska and the north coast of British Columbia would find in that vast and impenetrable wilderness. Anecdotally there should be dozens of villages hidden in there that have been operating for decades.

"The early settlements likely only worked because they had some method to force people from leaving"

That mechanism might have simply been, offering a warm and dry place and stored food, while it was freezing outside.

As of my knowledge, the transition process in general is pretty much a open research question.

There’s what is explicitly legal, there is what you can get away with, and there is moving between jurisdictions before they even know you’re there.

The US is large and if you keep your head down and homeschool to some level of competence I bet you could go many generations- especially if you were willing to blend in as necessary.

1 v 1, the average nomad could kill the average conscripted peasant who was physically weaker and less experienced. An iron vs a flint spear isn't going to make nearly as much of a difference. Superior numbers for the creation of a professional class of fighters that conquered the weaker nomads, but the steppe nomads remained superior in combat. The Roman, Chinese, Persian, and Muslim empires were only able to keep them at bay by turning them against each other. When they united, they were completely unstoppable.

With the Romans, the situation was the opposite. Their success was mostly based on the idea that conscripted peasants will eventually beat elite warriors. You just had to equip and train the conscripts instead of wasting the resources on the elites.

Because every man was expected to fight, the Romans had an effectively endless supply of experienced and well equipped soldiers. A society depending on a warrior class might win once or twice. But the Romans would still inflict some casualties. They would learn and adapt, and come back with another army next year. Sooner or later, the warrior class would be depleted, and Rome would prevail.

Eventually the Roman Republic grew large enough and successful enough to switch to a professional army. Not because it was better, but because the population was too large. There were not enough enemies to fight to make conscription useful.

Steppe nomads were far from unstoppable. They had occasional success in conquest, but their societies were set up to fail. The legitimacy of their leaders was based on personal relationships between the elites. When the leader of a large empire died, it was always unlikely that all leaders of note would support the successor. Most of the time, the empire would fracture into effectively independent polities. Sometimes there would be a figurehead leader on the top, but he would rarely have any real power over other leaders.

Especially the wascally ones.

There are no euphemisms. The issue I think you're having is viewing things in a an artificially binary fashion. In reality it's all a lot fuzzier. If you don't have enough resources in one area it doesn't mean everybody just starves, it instead means you work a bit more, or just make do with a bit less. And that creates a voluntary pressure against fertility. Nature even has relatively tame 'stop-loss' measures here that further reinforce this like the fact that malnutrition directly reduces fertility. So if we graph population vs time, there's going to be a trend, but it'll look a lot like a relatively low amplitude sine wave. You'd only see sharps shifts after something like a plague.

I am not claiming nomadic hunter gatherer societies were safe spaces, but there is a recurring misconception: people assume the nomadic lifestyle was harder and less desirable, otherwise humans wouldn't have made the transition to agrarian society.

Could perhaps slavery possibly be the bigger reason agrarian lifestyle "outcompeted" the nomadic lifestyle?

It's easy to proclaim a higher mean life quality in agrarian society if we discount the lives of the slaves.

With nomadic tribes, there is a constant churn of neighbor tribes, so hypothetical nomadic slavery would be much easier to escape than say the Roman Empire, where only near the boundaries of the Empire one might durably escape.

In an agrarian society neighboring villages etc use the same kinds of marks to discriminate the slaves from the citizens, so even if you escaped your master and the village, you'd end up needing to pass countless other villages which would recognize your assigned status, and turn you in for some reward / improved bilateral relations / ...

Today countless research indicates that permaculture, agroforestry, etc. are more productive than monoculture.

It is perfectly possible for nomadic cultures to be more efficient, and to provide more free time (a dangerous thing, since infighting and warring takes time), yet be "outcompeted" by systems of slavery!

For the leaders (of either nomadic tribes, or agrarian empires), the agrarian empire affords much more fruits of course!